


Scenes from a Route

by Epigone



Category: Sports Night
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-09
Updated: 2006-10-09
Packaged: 2018-02-13 20:02:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2163390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Epigone/pseuds/Epigone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“So maybe we end up taking the scenic route. We’ll get there eventually.”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scenes from a Route

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** Set pre-show, but spoilers for "The Apology."  
>  **Disclaimer:** When I get as smart as Aaron Sorkin, y'all will be the first to know. Till then, obviously I didn't make these people up.  
>  **Acknowledgments:** Thanks go to phoebesmum and very_improbable for beta work, and moreover for being more patient and helpful than I could have ever hoped (or probably deserved). Also to the trivia masters at the LJ communities little_details and sportsnight, for bailing me out more than once when I was in over my head. To rue_du_hoquet, who ploughed through it and spilled coffee on it and told me to breathe. And to zixi, who read the first page on a street corner one summer evening, and laughed.
> 
> * * *

**New England to Ohio, 1991**

They drive for hours, and it rains most of the way. They barrel through Niagara-like passes, water cascading down cliffs where some contractor was too impatient to go around a hill and, true American-style, blasted straight through. They trace the edges of valleys where clouds lie so low they snag in the treetops, whole forests gray and soggy as if they’ve been toilet-papered en masse. Dan watches the view whenever he’s not watching Casey, who fell asleep somewhere in Pennsylvania, head against the window and knees wedged under the glove compartment. He doesn’t wake up until a parking lot in Ohio.

Casey goes into the diner while Dan waits outside, absentmindedly kicking the tires. He’s solicitous about this new car, solicitous and a little awed, the way Casey’s gotten about Lisa since she started showing her pregnancy. It’s a good car, a slightly used Volvo station wagon bought cheap back East, even cheaper with the price split fifty-fifty. It’s roomy enough to carry three passengers plus all the baggage they’re not shipping, but the week before they left, Lisa put her foot down and said she’d rather fly alone than drive all the way to Ohio with two men who still think March Madness is the apogee of human evolution. So it’s just been Dan driving and Casey riding shotgun, nine hours on the interstate, America like a massive mirage drifting in front of them.

When Casey comes back out, Dan’s popped the trunk and is sitting on the back ledge of the car, with his feet dangling an inch above the asphalt. Casey hands him a sandwich wrapped in cellophane and sits down beside him.

“They had a bulletin board in there,” he says, “local advertising stuff, and one of the little business cards on it said, ‘Christian Power Cleaning.’ I’m still trying to figure out what that means.”

Dan unwraps the sandwich and sniffs it suspiciously. “We’ll clean your pool, and then we’ll walk on it?” he suggests.

“Welcome to America’s heartland.” Casey opens his own sandwich and starts devouring it. After a while, he says, “Sorry.”

“About what?”

“America’s heartland?” Casey says. “I mean, dragging you to Ohio to write for a show that they’ll only let me anchor.”

“Casey, seriously,” says Dan, around a mouthful of turkey and mayonnaise, “I graduated three months ago. I still have, like, overdue fees at the college library. And you drag me along to a paid job where I get to write sports stuff you’re going to say on camera? I don’t care if it’s in the _Balkans_.”

“It is better than the Balkans,” Casey allows. “Slightly less political turmoil.”

The horizon is clouding again, the storm chasing them from the coast. Wind ruffles the woebegone clumps of trees, trawls the cornfields across the way. Dan wolfs the last of his sandwich, balls up the wrapper, and shoots it one-armed into a wire trash can at the edge of the lot. He burrows his hands into his pockets.

“Does Lisa like me?” he asks.

Casey looks at him sideways and says, “She just met you last weekend. That was sort of the hidden agenda behind the whole barbeque sendoff. Not just so the local people could see us off—so you and Lisa could meet before we, you know, went off to live in the middle of nowhere together.”

“Like isn’t that complicated an emotion. I mean, it doesn’t take years to accrue or anything.”

“Of course she liked you,” says Casey, tossing away his own wrapper. “Who doesn’t?”

“Did she think I was cute and charming?”

“I think she thought that _I_ was her husband,” says Casey. “Hey, Dana really liked you.”

Dan considers that, hunching his shoulders against the growing cold. Casey introduced her as his old college friend Dana Whitaker: angular and pretty, but in an awkward way, with blond hair cut a little too short for her face. (She had about ten too many brothers growing up, Casey had explained, so she was still trying to throw off their influence; Dan remembers being puzzled at the idea of having superfluous brothers.) She was visiting from the West Coast, where she was working for a local news show, waiting for her big break. _I was just in the neighborhood_ , she said when she stopped by for the farewell barbecue in Casey’s postage-stamp-sized back yard; but Dan saw things in her smile that said that “in the neighborhood” meant anywhere within a five-hundred-mile radius. He liked her for that. He understood her for that.

 _Actually_ , Dan considers saying, _Dana almost seemed to think that you were_ her _husband_. But he’s gotten good at not saying everything he thinks.

“So Lisa likes me?” he asks.

“Listen,” says Casey, hopping off the ledge, “she takes a while to warm up to my friends. Don’t sweat it.” He goes around to the passenger door and waits there, watching the sky go gray. “It’s gonna rain.”

“Yeah,” says Dan. He clambers down and closes the trunk again. When he gets back into the driver’s seat, he can still see Casey waiting outside. Through the darkened glass of the window, Casey’s features are obscured, only the shape of his face discernable, the slight movement as he jiggles the locked door handle. For a moment Dan’s stomach opens up, a vertiginous drop into cavern upon cavern echoing back his answerlessness: who he is, where he’s going. He’s twenty-two years old, hundreds of miles from the last landmark he recognized: on the road with a Dartmouth diploma, a few suitcases, and half a station wagon to his name.

He unlocks the door and lets Casey in.

As he guns the motor, he says, “Okay, you’re gonna have to start reading me directions soon. Where’s this place again? Cincinnati?”

“That sounds good,” says Casey. “Or possibly Columbus?”

“You don’t _know_?” asks Dan.

“Well, it’s definitely one of the big Cs,” says Casey. Off Dan’s incredulous look, he reaches over and pats Dan on the cheek, open-palmed, like a benediction. “Don’t worry so much.”

If Dan were Catholic, he’d know the appropriate saint’s name to invoke—the patron saint of travelers and wayfarers, sailors lost at sea, drivers adrift mid-continent. But he’s Jewish, and Casey’s is the only name he knows here.

Casey says, “So maybe we end up taking the scenic route. We’ll get there eventually.”

***

**Ohio, 1993**

Monday morning, ten hours before Casey’s due at the airport, Dan buys a bottle of Merlot, in case the news is good, and two six-packs of Budweiser, in case it’s bad. On the way back he notices that his car’s a mud-splattered mess from the week’s rain. He wants everything in order for Casey, so he stops at the nearest carwash and has it scoured inside and out.

When he gets back to the apartment at noon, he can hear the accusing bleat of the answering machine as soon as he opens the door. He pauses only to set the alcohol down—an easy drop-off, since his fridge is almost empty. It’s been months since he’s eaten a major weekend meal anywhere but at the McCalls’ place. This week, Casey’s been out West visiting with Dana and discreetly doing reconnaissance for better job opportunities, and Dan’s dietary adjustment has been awkward and halting; his restocking limited to milk and lunch meats, takeout at night.

When he presses the Replay button on the answering machine, it informs him sedately that it’s been holding his messages since eleven-thirty a.m. Then Casey’s voice tumbles out in a rush, like a racehorse released at the gates.

“Hey, listen, Dan, the long-distance fees are killing me here, so I’m gonna give you a summary—a paraphrase, okay?—and have you pass it along to Lisa. We’re in Texas—”

“ _Texas_?” Dan asks of it, putting his hands flat on the dresser and leaning closer. “What the hell happened to Dana and Seattle?”

“—uh, Dallas, Dallas, Texas, and I’ll tell you what, Danny, it’s still _hot_ here. When I left Ohio it was forty degrees and raining. I could get used to this kind of weather really fast.”

Dan makes a sour face, glancing at the window. Outside, the rain has started again. Ohio: the state of endless cornfields and cold drizzle, of skies clouded over six months at a stretch, gray as the slush the plows spray by the roadsides.

“Anyway,” Casey is saying, “there’s a network down here with a president who knows Dana—don’t ask me how, there’re all sorts of studs-and-spurs, ten-gallon-hat guys out West with whom Dana is apparently very chummy and it kind of passes understanding—but the point is, I get into Seattle Monday, and Dana says, ‘Hey, change of plans, we’re going to Texas on Friday.’ So we went to Texas. And we talked to this guy, about me maybe doing some kind of anchoring, and he’s listening. You know that audition tape you made early in the year, and head-up-his-Asner said no go? Dig it up and get it ready to send out, ’cause this guy’s making noises like he might consider us both if we’re any good. So, okay, listen, I told Dana I’d stay a little longer and talk to some more people, so I need you to tell Lisa and the _Update_ people that I’m gonna be out here through Wednesday. Uh, I’ll give you my flight stuff later, I’ve gotta go—I’ll see you in two days, Danny, write me something fantastic for Thursday, okay?”

And the phone on the other end—half an hour old and half a continent away—clicks and breaks the connection.

Dan exhales slowly. For a minute he stands there, listening as the machine resumes its steady beep. He wanders over to the fridge and peers in: definitely not enough for lunch, let alone dinner. He pops the top on a can of beer and downs it in a few gulps. Then he goes out through the hallway again; closes the front door on the silent apartment, with all the lights off and the ghost of Casey’s call still giving metallic voice to the machine; and backs the painfully clean station wagon into the street.

The McCalls live about fifteen minutes outside Columbus proper, in a split-level ranch paid for—as Lisa has taken to reminding Casey in the last year—mostly by Lisa’s family money. Dan takes a roundabout route, over the Olentangy River where the water flows swift and pockmarked with rain. He swings close by OSU, as if drawn by its collegiate gravity; by its half-imagined stench of peanuts and cheap beer, the strangely congruent odors of moldy socks and pot. Last night the Buckeyes beat Northwestern to continue their winning streak, and even from across town Dan could hear the uproar. This morning the streets are littered with debris, a road sign or two uprooted, a few trash cans still smoldering from hastily doused bonfires. Not three years ago, he was one of these kids, kicking up dust in Hanover at all hours. He puts on the brakes and idles there, at the edge of the campus, the periphery of it all.

He remembers a night two years ago, a few weeks after Lisa came back from the hospital, working out the kinks in a script in Casey’s living room. Casey was lying on the floor, propped up on his elbows with the pages spread out before him. When Charlie’s wail crackled over the baby monitor on the coffee table, Casey had looked up—at Dan on the sofa, but not really at him—and said, wide-eyed, “Jesus. For a second there I thought—for a second I was back home, maybe seven years old, listening to my baby sister crying. But that’s not my sister crying, Danny. That’s my _son_.”

Dan gets it now. The windswept campus, the old returning smells, the quiet of a Sunday morning before anyone has stirred from last night’s exploits—all of it a faint, static-riddled siren call out of memory. And then the double shock: that he was that young once, and that he isn’t any longer. The nearness of childhood, and the distance.

Momentarily he understands Casey. Understands the onslaught of a wife, a car, a house, a kid, and the steady job needed to pay for all of them; the way they tug against the urge to wander, to shop around, to find the next big thing. Momentarily, he feels closer to Casey than he has in months, possibly since they joined Lisa in Ohio, certainly since Charlie was born.

And then he remembers how far away Casey is. Across the plains in Texas, with Dana and her big-time friends. So now it’s just Dan still here, squabbling with their producer Terry Asner about scripts by day (“It’s not that _no one_ gets the references, Daniel; it’s just that I don’t happen to know anyone who does”) and listening to football riots by night. Just him and Lisa, drifting around Ohio like tumbleweed.

At the house, he eases the car into the driveway, beside the neat little Camry that Lisa insisted Casey buy. He stands uncomfortably on the doorstep, pricked with drizzle, and rings the bell. It takes a while for Lisa to answer.

“Dan,” she says, opening the main door but not the screen. Her hair is pulled back in a loose ponytail; she’s wearing sweatpants and a Black Dog T-shirt with a low neckline that exposes the round, pale tops of her breasts. She watches him through the mesh, her face rigor-mortis stiff.

“Hey, Lisa,” he says. He doesn’t know why he always feels apologetic toward her, whether he’s lingering on her stoop or dialing her phone number or distracting her husband. He steps closer, huddling under the eaves of the house, reaching for the screen. “Casey wanted me to—”

Lisa shifts slightly, so that her body blocks the light from the hallway. He doesn’t touch the screen.

“Charlie’s got chickenpox,” Lisa says.

“Oh,” Dan says. “Well, that’s okay, I’ve already had…” She doesn’t move. He looks at her more closely and recognizes the blank exhaustion in her face. He thinks of his own mother, haggard after a long night with—it would have been Debbie. Not Sam. He and Sam had chickenpox at the same time, when Dan was nine and Sam seven. His images of that time are like muddy watercolors, blurred by his own fever and discomfort, no glimpse of Sam at all.

He has to remind himself, sometimes, that he doesn’t remember things like Sam’s chickenpox, Sam’s birth. Sam’s death. That his image of the wreckage, too, is false; the firefighters delivering Sam’s body from the car, the afterbirth of dripping gasoline and shattered glass. Instead of memories, he’s gotten used to echoes. Baby photos; the little white scars in the hollows of Sam’s knees, where surreptitious scratching could go unnoticed; an empty bedroom next to his.

“What’s going on?” Lisa asks.

Dan blinks, hard.

“I got a message from Casey. He’s, uh, he’s in Texas. He and Dana. They’re talking to a guy down there. They’re gonna stay an extra two days.”

“He couldn’t call and tell me that himself?” Lisa asks. Dan shrugs; he considers saying _Long-distance fees_ , but thinks better of it. Lisa sighs and leans against the doorframe, and after a while she says, “If Casey gets what he wants, we’re packing up again and moving to Texas. That’s what this means.” She smiles at the screen. “Casey usually gets what he wants.”

“Yeah,” says Dan. “Casey refutes the Rolling Stones like nobody else I know.”

She turns the smile on him, but it’s impersonal, unrelated to either of them.

“You’re getting wet,” she says. “Do you need some lunch or something?”

“Nah, thanks, it’s okay,” says Dan. “I’ve got stuff at home. I’ll be fine.”

Lisa lifts a hand and scoops up her ponytail behind her head. She nods. Then she asks, “Do you think he’s sleeping with Dana?”

“No,” he says, and thinks about it. Texas. He imagines rodeo trappings, a country-music soundtrack. He can’t imagine it at all. “No.”

“Fuck,” says Lisa. She looks at Dan nakedly. “What am I supposed to _do_ with myself?”

“I don’t know,” says Dan, and he really, really doesn’t.

***

**Texas, 1994**

Maybe it’s just because they got picked up for a national show about four months later than expected, but by the end of that spring, they’ve all had just about as much of Texas as they can take. Dan’s starting to get a sense for this, their transcontinental wearing out of welcomes, and he’s discovered that there are three warning signs that it’s time to move on.

Number one is malaise about the weather. Dan’s gradually crawling out of his skin with the heat, sleeping away the weekend daylight like a lizard; he’s taken to calling his apartment “the brick oven.” The first time Casey heard the reference, he’d said, “Danny, your apartment’s made of concrete or something,” and Dan had retorted, “For someone who claims to be a writer, you sure are stultifyingly literal-minded.”

Number two is that Casey starts flirting with Dana. In Columbus, on the flimsiest pretexts, he’d make long-distance calls to her from the office, covertly, and go off into the editing room and lean against a wall and laugh into the receiver. Here, all he has to do is knock on her office door. It makes things much simpler; and, with Lisa just down the road keeping his house, much more complicated.

Number three is that Dan starts flirting with everyone. Studio techs, guest anchors, supermarket cashiers, women in bars. Men in bars.

Casey turned up in his bedroom this morning at eleven o’clock, courtesy of a house key that Dan regrets ever giving him. Their producer Jill is throwing an all-day party at her place to celebrate their induction into the big leagues, but Dan, exhausted by a hangover and the beginnings of a summer cold, had slept through his alarm. And so, Casey: standing in the pooled light by the window, staring at him in bed.

Staring at the bed, actually, and the pair of briefs draped pennant-like over the headboard.

Dan, emerging haphazardly from sleep, stared back at him for a second. Then he rolled out of bed, coughed a little longer than necessary, and said, “I overslept.”

“Yeah,” said Casey. “You’re wearing briefs now?”

Dan had just looked at him, and then slowly made his way into the bathroom. He’d popped an aspirin and a few too many Sudafed, and closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the medicine-cabinet mirror.

“Okay,” Casey had said through the open door. “Okay.”

So, after the long, silent drive to Jill’s, Dan’s making a point of keeping on the margins of the party. For now, that means sitting on a narrow ledge of rock by the artificial pond at the far end of the lawn, tossing in food from the hors d’oeuvre table and reciting seventeenth-century love poetry to a flotilla of fish.

They’re very big fish, solid and slow-moving. They browse his offerings, surfacing sporadically with their mouths blackly open. There’s something elegant about their ugliness, something coquettish about the way they circle. He thinks of them fondly as upside-down cattle, following their floating food, grazing overhead. It seems logical to recite poetry to them.

“Now, therefore,” he declaims, “while the youthful hue sits on thy skin like morning dew,” and a stone whizzes past him and splashes into the pond, sending the fish swarming in a sun-struck mass for the opposite shore. He looks up, and Casey’s standing a few yards away, one arm still extended from the throw.

“What’re you doing?” Casey asks.

“Feeding the fish,” says Dan. As evidence, he opens a hand. “This stuff from the table.”

Casey comes closer. He takes a piece, being a little too obvious about not touching Dan’s hand, and holds it at eye level. “Most of us call these crackers.”

“Oh, good,” says Dan. “I’d been thinking it was just really dry caviar, and that was like cannibalism advocacy.” He grins wryly. “Uh, I think a little less Sudafed, next time.”

Casey laughs and says, “So, I really suspect Jill of being an oil baron on the side. This is a swanky place—I mean, have you been inside the house yet? And all this land, and apparently a pond full of giant goldfish—”

“Koi,” says Dan. “‘Giant goldfish’ sounds plebeian. I think you’re supposed to call them koi. Hence the poetry. ‘To His Coy Mistress.’ They have this really delicate way of eating, like they’re playing hard to get.”

“Yeah, Danny, I got the homophone thing.” Casey’s not quite making eye contact. He lobs the cracker into the pond, and they both watch it bob there, spreading ripples. “Is it—” Casey stops and starts again. “Do you want your key back?”

Dan puts his hands flat against the ground and hunches forward, trying to relieve the tension in his back muscles. He wishes he knew what he did last night.

“No,” he says.

“Do you want me to… like, knock in the future?”

“Casey,” says Dan, “no. Don’t worry about about it. Mi casa es su casa, y’know?” He looks up and Casey’s smiling lopsidedly, as if one corner of his mouth is dragging the rest along with it. Watching that inexorable little tug, Dan knows what Casey wants to says; knows it’s not something he wants to hear; knows that Casey knows, but will say it anyway.

“Listen—” says Casey.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t say it.” Dan forces a laugh. “Don’t say what you’re going to say. Don’t tell me about your high-school best friend and the locker room, don’t tell me about that one drunken night in the frat house—whatever it was, Case, don’t tell me. Okay? Because it’s not what I need to be hearing right now.” He doesn’t bother to glance up again; he knows Casey’s expression. He can conjure it perfectly: the even stare, the precise diamond-cut line of the lips softening even now.

“Fine,” says Casey. “That’s fine, too. Okay.” Dan can hear the grainy scrape of loose gravel under his shoes as he steps closer. “I can still sit here, though?”

Wordlessly, Dan scoots over, freeing a space on the ledge, and Casey hunkers down beside him. For a long time, the only sound is the indecipherable murmur of conversation from the party across the lawn, a foreign language and a separate continent.

Casey exhales, shifting position so that Dan can feel the flat of his hip, and says, “So. Congratulations to us. Y’know, there were times, these last couple of months, I started thinking it wasn’t gonna happen. That every one of those LA network execs would just pass us over. And I was banking on us going national, I really was. I—” He starts to say something, and then seems to think better of it. Dan looks sideways at him: he’s licking his lips. “Well, so I got scared. Boxed in, you know? But they came through, and everything’s blowing wide open again, the walls are tumbling down. We are _here_ , Danny, and we’re about to happen.”

“Yeah?” asks Dan. “I’m still scared.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. Shit-scared.”

Casey makes a deprecating noise in the back of his throat. “Of what? Finally getting what you want?”

“Don’t be psychoanalytical. Of… maybe we’re not ready to happen yet.”

“Listen,” says Casey. He bounces in place, and Dan can feel his hip again, and the length of his thigh, his body in motion. “We’ve been ready for years. We’ve been ready since the day I met you. It’s not a question of us. It’s a question of _it_. When _it_ ’s ready, it’ll happen. And okay, we can’t be sure when it’ll happen, but LA’s as good a place as any to go looking. Hell of a lot better than Dallas, that’s for sure.” He looks sideways. “Trust me. Eventually, we’re gonna get what we want.”

They sit there watching the fish slowly venture back to their side of the pond. Every now and then, Dan moves a little, just to remind himself, again, of the shape of them together.

“I should go mingle some more,” Casey says. He stands up, brushing off the seat of his pants. “You coming?”

“Nah,” says Dan. “I mean, not now. In a while. I’ll be there in a while.”

“We’ll all be waiting breathlessly,” says Casey.

Dan turns to watch him go. Dana, talking to a group of people nearby, catches sight of him and joins him halfway to the house. They walk the rest of the way together, Casey touching her elbow occasionally. She got an offer to help produce the new show; she’s coming with them to LA, and Dan knows it’ll be great professionally and disastrous personally. Nothing changes.

The shadows curl closer, lapping at the edges of the lawn. Dan’s Sudafed is wearing off. He thinks about him and Casey in LA, talking sports on national television, and it’s like a stone dropped right through his stomach, scattering everything.

***

**California, 1995**

Before all this, Dan had always assumed the weather was the same everywhere west of the Mississippi, a kind of uniform browned-over aridity. But now they’re coming to the end of August, the fuse of summer burning low, and he’s learning that LA is nothing like Texas. Texas fits his image of the West, where the mercury starts shooting up the thermometer at sunrise; in LA, the heat is slow-moving and vitreous, and being out in it is like looking at the world through the end of a glass bottle, everything off-color and distorted. In the summer nights he swims through it, and his sleep is fitful, too brief and fragmented for dreams.

He opens his eyes on Sunday morning, and through the slitted blinds the sun looks pale and jaundiced. The clock winks at him from the bureau, six o’clock, and there’s no chance he’s falling asleep again. He gets up, dresses, and meanders into the living room.

This place is a step up from the succession of dorm rooms and studio apartments he’s had since he left home. There are perks to doing national TV after all. Maybe the network doesn’t trust them to write most of their own material, and maybe he’s stranded high and dry in yet another city he doesn’t know, and maybe Casey’s still making twice what Dan is. Still, he has to admit that he’s making twice what he ever made before, and that translates into this house: great location in the city, more rooms than he even sees in a day, utilities galore. And, through the sliding glass door adjoining the living room, a screened porch, where now he can see Casey in the hammock.

He slips through the door noiselessly and stands on the other side, watching. Casey’s lying on his side, facing out through the mesh, reading a paperback that he holds at arm’s length. His white feet, the only unsunned part of him, rest against the metal bar of the hammock.

“Hey,” says Dan.

Casey lifts his head without moving his body.

“Hey,” he says. “I didn’t want to wake you up. I just let myself in the porch door and decided to hang around out here. It’s much cooler than inside, y’know.”

“It’s fine,” says Dan. He pauses. “Is something going on with Lisa?”

“Something’s always going on with Lisa,” says Casey.

That’s true. Particularly since the _Late Night_ thing, Lisa’s really been riding Casey. It doesn’t strike Dan as fair—as if Casey doesn’t already feel bad enough about that rejection—but then again, there’s also the Dana situation, and Lisa can’t possibly turn a blind eye to that any more.

Dan can’t, either. Last weekend the show sent them out to cover the Stanley Cup, and on the way home they got stuck overnight in Saint Paul when a layover turned into a canceled flight. Late Sunday night, in the bar of the nearby Radisson, Dana and Casey both had a little too much Jägermeister and got overfriendly—with each other and with Dan. Dana put on a show for Casey’s benefit, flirting with Dan shamelessly, bumping knees between their stools. At two a.m., as Dan tried to lead Casey out, Casey turned and fairly shouted, “Danny! Danny, Danny, Danny. You’re like the brother I never had, you know that? You and me, we’re gonna do big things. Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by, from this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remembered.” Thrilled by the idea, he’d careered into Dan and given him an awkward sideways embrace around the head. His wrist came to rest below Dan’s ear, and Dan could feel their pulses ticking together with the precision of a Geiger counter in the presence of radiation. For a split second, Dan understood: it’s these invisible, atomic collisions that will ravage you from the inside out.

And Casey just stood there, holding Dan still, reciting the St. Crispin’s Day speech in his anchor’s voice: his voice like an anchor, even and settled, enormous in the empty echoing lobby of the Radisson.

Never mind what Casey and Dana meant to each other—that evening, Dan no longer knew what he meant to either of them. So he got Casey back to his room safely, and then went back to the bar and erased the rest of the night.

“Did I tell you what she did over the weekend?” Casey’s saying.

“Who?” asks Dan.

Casey frowns at him. “Lisa. Who do you think?”

“Made a point of flushing the toilet while you were in the shower?”

“Nah, that was last month’s trick,” says Casey. “While we were away, she bought a coffee table, without saying a word about it to me. So I come home on Sunday night and walk into the living room, which is where I go to _unwind_ , and there’s this big-ass walnut thing sitting in front of the couch. It’s been there four days and I still can’t get over it. It’s, it’s like—there’s this new force field in there now. It changes the shape of the room.”

“You sound like an unhinged interior decorator,” says Dan. “Uh, so, what’s up with you being in my hammock at six a.m.? Did you, uh… did you go home last night?”

“Nah,” says Casey. He rolls over onto his back, folding the book around a hand and resting it on his stomach. “Had a couple of drinks after work, wandered around outside for a while, called a cab and came here.” Dan looks at him searchingly, but he seems to be telling the truth. “I figured, what the hell, it was so late that Lisa was going to assume something was going on no matter what, so I might as well not go back at all. Let her believe I went home with somebody.”

“Well, technically you did,” Dan points out.

Casey laughs a little and says, “I went home _to_ somebody. There’s a difference.” He closes his eyes. “Hey, Danny?”

“Yeah?” There’s a white plastic lawn chair toppled over on the floor, and Dan rights it, turns it around, and sits on it, facing Casey with his chin resting on the curved back.

“Next time we do remote coverage somewhere, let’s not take Dana out with us.”

“I could get behind that plan,” says Dan dryly.

“No more women,” says Casey, massaging his temples. “Seriously. Let’s not even go to bars any more; there could be women. Let’s just—next weekend, let’s just throw some stuff in the trunk of the car and drive up to the mountains somewhere and fish in streams all day. You, me, a tackle box, and a whole lotta testosterone.”

Dan resists the urge to point out that Casey’s never fished in his life. He kicks the chair legs idly. Dirt flakes off in long slivers; he hasn’t cleaned any of this stuff since he got it.

“That’s very… Hemingwayesque of you,” he says.

Casey groans and, without opening his eyes, tosses the paperback at him. Dan catches it by reflex, soft cupped hands, and turns it over. He laughs: _The Sun Also Rises_.

“Oh, Casey,” he says, surprised to find he’s relieved, “I really don’t know anyone less cool than you.”

Casey doesn’t respond. His lips are pursed, his eyes moving under their lids. Finally, he asks, “Did you hear what Dana was telling me that night in the bar?”

“About how she can tie two cherry stems into a square knot with her tongue? I think I stopped listening after that part.”

“Wait, she was? She _can_?” Casey opens his eyes.

“The things you learn when you grow up around boats,” Dan says, shaking his head. “And yet still you belittle the sport of offshore yacht racing.”

“Wow.” Casey steeples his fingers on his chest. “Uh. She—” He squints at the ceiling for a while. Then he shakes himself all over. “All right, I’ll investigate this later. I think what I’m talking about was several martinis before that. You ever heard of Isaac Jaffee?”

Dan thinks, rolling his head from side to side, shoulder to shoulder. “Um… wait, yeah—he won a Pulitzer, didn’t he?”

“Yeah.” Casey beams, gratified. “He did some amazing reporting on Gemini Eight. Dana said she knows him through some mutual friends, and he was in town last week and told her he’s been following her career.”

“That’s pretty cool,” says Dan neutrally.

“No, _this_ is pretty cool. There’s this guy in New York called Luther Sachs with a network that he’s hoping to make the next big thing—complete with a regular sports channel. Jaffee wants to come out of retirement to be a managing editor, and he wants Dana to produce the eleven-o’clock show. And he wants anchors who can write their own stuff.”

Dan looks at Casey.

“Our contracts expire in the spring, Danny,” says Casey. “Think about it. Dana, you, and me calling the shots on our own show.” Dan doesn’t say anything. “You really want to sign on again here and do some more time? Grin and bear it while some hack half as talented as us puts words in our mouth just because he’s somebody’s son, somebody’s younger brother? It’s feudal, and it’s bullshit. You don’t want that. _I_ sure don’t want that. I’m gonna be thirty in a month, I have to _do_ something.”

“You’ve mentioned this to Lisa?” asks Dan.

Casey gives a barking laugh. “Yeah. Sure. Because I want to tell Lisa as soon as humanly possible about this, so she can get a jump on complaining about it. ‘Stop chasing pipe dreams, Casey. Settle down, Casey. Stop moving, Casey.’”

“We do move a lot,” says Dan.

“That’s what people do,” says Casey. “You aren’t going to find it if you don’t go after it.”

Casey’s pushing thirty and still, every time he sees another faraway city, he believes it’s Mecca. Dan just turned twenty-six, and somewhere in their endless westward migration toward California gold he stopped being the baby of every office. Now there are techs and assistants and rising stars still working on their undergraduate degrees, and he’s not one of them. Not being the baby any more means not being the boy wonder; it means feeling tired and cynical and ended, some nights, when he stares into the black hole of the camera. Not being the baby any more means not really being anyone.

“I’m tired of chasing the Holy Grail, Casey,” he says.

“Just think about it,” says Casey. “It’s New York. You told me you loved New York.”

“Yeah, ‘loved.’ I haven’t been to the city since I was a kid. Nothing’s the same.”

“I know,” says Casey. “Exactly. That’s why we should go. Everything’s new. That’s why they call it New York: people go there and build skyscrapers from the ground up.”

“As opposed to the places where they build ’em from the sky down?”

Casey puts out a hand. If they were a little closer, they’d be touching.

“We’d fit right in,” he says. “We’d be the best thing to hit that city since a bunch of dancers in cat suits got up on stage and started butchering T.S. Eliot.”

“I saw _Cats_ , like, fifteen years ago,” Dan says, “and even then I could tell it was pretty crappy. It’s not really an auspicious comparison.” But his heart starts to hammer, because it’s Casey and he can’t help himself. He says, “I’d have to sell the Volvo.”

“Probably.”

“It’s got a lot of miles on it,” says Dan slowly.

“Don’t we all,” says Casey. “Just think about it. You and me, on our own terms.”

“Okay. I’ll think about it.”

“We few, we happy few….” says Casey feelingly.

“ _Casey_ ,” says Dan, grinning. “I’ll think about it.”

Casey’s smiling too, but he doesn’t say anything more. He just sets the hammock to swinging. His eyes are closed again, and Dan can tell he’s dreaming it for both of them.

***

**New York, 1996**

D-Day arrives on a Monday in July, a morning that dawns bright and unusually clear. Dan and Casey meet at the subway station, and for the first time since they arrived in the city, Casey has a little bounce in his step. Dan’s not fooled into believing that he got enough sleep last night, not between Charlie’s bronchitis and the inevitable fight with Lisa; but he’s exuding that zealous, heady, college-kid assurance that sleep is superfluous, and for now that’s enough. They buy their bagels at the local shop and start their daily trek to the office, through the heart of New York City.

The last time Dan saw these streets, he was eighteen years old. One morning in September, he and Sam drove down—the first time Dan had been allowed to take Sam alone—for a final day trip before school started. Dan played tour guide, hitting up all of the places they never visited as a family: Greenwich Village, tiny independent music stores, a Broadway show. Sam found the show puzzling but amusing, like a minor math problem, and for the rest of the day all Dan had to do was mention the cat costumes and they’d both be off into gales of laughter. Their parents had never been theater fans; it was Sam’s first and last musical.

Afterward, as the day simmered into cindery dusk, they went out on the Staten Island ferry, just for the hell of it. Dan smoked a joint, only half-hidden, and they leaned on the railing and watched the water, their two dark heads bent together against the wind. Their father yelled when they got back so late that they woke up the whole house, but Dan was leaving for Dartmouth on Monday, and nothing could touch him.

Now, when he thinks of Sam, that’s what he remembers. The slate-gray swell of New York Harbor sliding away, the taut bulge of the surface moving under them like the back of a leviathan. Water under the bridge, he tells himself. Passed away. Since the day Sam died, it’s been easier to simply omit him. Dan’s discovered that he can talk about his siblings in the plural, as a collective, and it will never even occur to other people that he’s talking about a brother, a sister, and an empty room.

He’s always meant to tell Casey, and he’s never managed. After all, Casey is an entirely post-Sam phenomenon, and he doesn’t do well with abrupt introductions. Dan remembers him freaking out over the new coffee table in his LA living room, where once there had been only blank space. The empty room, the elided brother—that little gap in Dan is all Casey has ever known. Dan’s always thought it would unnerve him to suddenly find it filled.

So Dan doesn’t say anything. He does his job. Nights, he takes Casey out bar-hopping, whenever Lisa burns his dinner on purpose or Dana overrules him on some minor production point. Weekends, he shows Casey around the city, surprised by it himself: the harbor, the hum on every street corner, the electric shiver of the subway under his feet, all of this subterranean sameness just beneath the surface of renovated storefronts and construction projects. It’s the closest he’s ever come to being a kid again. On those afternoons, piloting the two of them deeper and deeper into the arterial rush and pressure of old New York, sometimes he stops and looks at Casey and thinks, _You’re like the brother I thought I’d never have again_.

They walk the three blocks to their building, an enormous glassy high-rise that radiates a multifaceted gleam when the sun strikes it at certain angles. In the middle of the sidewalk traffic, Dan stops and lays his hand over his heart. Feet apart, he tilts back his head and looks up into the shine.

“Oh, say, can you see,” he intones, half-laughing, “by the dawn’s early light...”

Casey draws in behind him, puts a hand on his shoulder, and looks up solemnly. Dan stops laughing, and they stand there together, a silent double pledge of allegiance to something they don’t quite understand.

Inside, they don’t have any more time to think about it. At eleven o’clock tonight they hit the air with _Sports Night_ , and everything is moving at triple speed. Their first feature still has to be cut together, and it’s a big one: an interview that Dan did with Dominique Moceanu. Isaac had called in some favors to get her, and everyone—including Dan—had expected it to go to Casey, the senior anchor. Instead, Dana had called Dan into her office one afternoon and told him it was his.

It was only later that he’d realized how savvy Dana was. In most of Moceanu’s other interviews with reporters, she’d seemed almost too deft and light-handed, just bunting the pitches. With him, she connected. Afterward, he’d gone to Dana exhilarated by his success, and she’d smiled and said, “I know. You elicit that response. That’s what we’re here for. Danny, the two of you are brighter, wittier, and more engaging than any other anchors working on television, and you in particular have a monopoly on young and hip.” It was the first time since he was eighteen that he hadn’t felt years older than his age.

He spends most of the day in Editing, working with the Moceanu footage and drinking coffee to mask his jitters. Every now and then he pauses the tape and goes to track down Casey, just to touch base. At nine-thirty p.m., he finishes and wanders aimlessly out into the hall. The last rundown of the day isn’t for half an hour yet, and there’s nothing left to do: they’ve spent weeks honing this first script of theirs. Now everything is waiting for them to happen; hoping that they’ll happen.

He goes to check in with the staff in the control room, where he finds them running one last equipment check. And there, caught in the square eye of one of the middle screens, is Casey, prematurely playing at being an anchor. Casey’s a pro; he hasn’t had that kid-in-a-candy-shop expression on his face in years; but here, under the New York lights, forty-nine stories of glass in the air, it’s like the first time all over again. He’s put on the sports coat that Wardrobe hung over his chair for him, and he’s wearing his earpiece. He’s flirting with the techs dashing to and fro, but only absentmindedly: his real love affair is with the studio. He’s already taken to calling it his second home, but Dan has no doubt that it’s going to end up as his primary home.

The staff give Dan noncommittal looks, a few smiles; he’s been formally introduced to most of them, but he’s still trying to meet the minor techs and interns in his spare time. He leans against the control board and picks up the nearest microphone.

“Attention, Mr. McCall,” he barks into it. Onscreen, Casey jumps and glances around. “We would like to inform you that on page nine of your script for tonight, we caught a lingering bit of confusion over restrictive versus nonrestrictive clauses. ‘That’ for restrictive, ‘which’ for nonrestrictive, if you recall.”

“Okay,” Casey says, “who’s talking to me?”

Dan considers. “God?”

“Nah.” Casey flicks his earpiece like an insect. “Not even God is such a stickler for grammar. What’s up, Danny?”

“Not much,” Dan says. “The Moceanu thing’s ready. The script, after my intervention, is ready.” He stops. He thinks, _Are you, Casey? Am I?_

Casey shifts his weight in the chair and looks up, straight into the camera. After a second, he pushes off from the desk. Drifting backward, he raises his arms in front of him and gives a two-handed thumbs-up. Dan smiles at the screen and finds that his mouth feels too small for what it needs to say.

“Okay,” he says. “Yeah, okay, good. I’ll, uh, I’ll see you at the rundown in a bit.” He sets the mic down gently and leaves the room.

In the hall, he pauses, listening to a faint sound. He takes a moment to place it as retching; he’s not used to being on this end of it. It’s coming from the restroom ahead, and without hesitation he goes in. The retching has stopped, but only one of the stalls is closed, and in the open slat beneath the door he can see someone kneeling.

“You okay in there?” he asks.

The toilet flushes, and then a woman’s voice that he doesn’t recognize says, “I’m totally fine. Yes. Thank you.”

“I just thought—”

“It’s nothing. Something I ate last night. Word to the wise: don’t order the oysters at that place down the street.” After a moment, the woman says, “So you heard something and just walked into a women’s bathroom?”

“This is a women’s bathroom?” he asks. “I didn’t realize.”

“I’m wearing high heels,” she says. He looks again at her legs under the door, and it’s true.

“The voice should’ve been a tip-off, too,” he says. “Sorry. Maybe knowing your name will help me keep it straight? Unless you have an androgynous name, in which case—”

“Natalie Hurley,” she says. “‘Nat’ if you really wanna prolong the mystery.”

Dan smiles and sits down on the floor on the other side of the door. It seems like the sympathetic thing to do.

“I don’t think we’ve met yet,” he says. “What do you do?”

“Oh, I’m just—I’m a summer intern,” Natalie says.

“Yeah?” Dan says. “Where do you go to school?”

“I’ve actually already graduated,” she says. “Northwestern.”

Her voice sounds younger. Dan cranes his neck sideways to look again: her legs look younger.

“First job out of school?” he asks.

“First job that matters,” she says, and laughs, with a bitter, hopeful catch in her voice he knows so well that he feels it again himself. “I majored in journalism, I did all the school papers, and I’ve been working on two-bit Nowheresville Posts and radio stations ever since. No sports. I grew up in a town where basically nobody had cable TV, so I used to have to walk to every high-school football game and pickup basketball game at the community courts just to get my fix; I basically kept _The Daily Northwestern_ ’s sports section alive for four years; and now I get out and finally find the places where people care, and everybody looks at me and says, ‘You’re five feet tall in heels. You’re cute. What’re you doing in sports?’” She stops. Dan can see her scoot away from the toilet and rest her back against the door. “Sorry. Sometimes that just erupts.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “I get it. You’ve been on the scenic route.”

There’s a smile in her voice when she says, “Yeah, you could say that. So I’d really like this to pan out. I think it could be really good, you know? I mean, some of the people working here are—they’re, like, they’re poised on the cusp. The anchors are fantastic. I’ve seen some of their stuff and I don’t know why they don’t already have the top show in the country.”

Dan starts to laugh. He leans his head against the wall and says to the fly-speckled ceiling, “We don’t either.”

“Oh, shit,” Natalie says, and stands up on the other side of the wall. “I—you’re one of them, aren’t you? Your voice sounds different off camera. But you’re Rydell. Dan Rydell.”

“I have name recognition in New York?” Dan says. “This is a first. I knew I loved this city.”

“I’m really, really sorry,” says Natalie. “I didn’t recognize—”

“It’s cool. It’s _more_ than cool. Nobody praises me to my face any more. I mean, not even to my face via a wall.” He gets up, too. “You sure you’re okay? You need any help?”

“It’s fine. I’m just gonna clean myself up, so….” Her voice trails off vaguely. “You have the ten o’clock rundown in, like, two minutes.”

Dan checks his watch, and his pulse spikes so high he can hear it. He goes over to the mirror, turns sideways to check his profile.

“Yeah,” he says. “Thanks. I’m the one who should be apologizing; you work here and I didn’t even know your name. Am I ever gonna get to put a face to it?”

Natalie’s laugh is low and nervous, but sincere. “Yeah. I’ll wave to you on the first commercial break or something.”

“Be sure you do,” Dan says. “I’ll be watching for it.” He turns and faces the mirror head-on again. “Listen,” he says slowly, “if it starts getting to you again, just close your eyes, count to twenty, and breathe. Sometimes it helps.” And sometimes it doesn’t, he thinks; so we’re lucky that, fourteen hours a day, the bathroom’s just a sprint down the hall.

Dan looks at himself. It’s been months since he was last on camera; and it’s only now, seeing his framed reflection in its tie and buttoned-up blue shirt, its lean young face and its show-time eyes already losing their casualness, that he remembers what it’s like. He’d almost forgotten how reality is doubled, deepened, magnified—all because, suddenly, he’s not the only one watching his every move.

Natalie says, “I’m just a little scared.”

“Of what?” Dan asks. “Putting up the wrong graphic? We’ll survive.”

“No,” she says. “That this isn’t it. That it’s going to be another wrong turn. I’m about at the end of my rope; I’ve got loans to pay off, you know? If this doesn’t work out, I’ll have to move back home and work some crappy practical temp jobs for a while. You’ve been around, haven’t you? Going up against ESPN and Fox—are we gonna survive _that_?”

In an hour they’ll be out there, building up to the Moceanu feature. He already knows what he’s going to say: Dominique Moceanu, the wunderkind gymnast, about to break into the big leagues before she hits sixteen. Too young to even drive a car, but not too young to drive a nation to its feet.

He’s not that young any more, he knows. Sam will be that young forever. But somewhere in between those two certainties, there might still be space for him to make it. For him and for Casey: the two of them together, filling up the studio. One room that won’t have to sit empty any longer.

He gives himself a thumbs-up in the glass.

“I don’t know,” he says. “But I think we’re about to find out.”

**Author's Note:**

> "Not fitting in is how qualified people lose jobs!"  
> “Yeah, but a lot of the time… it’s how they end up working here."  
> —Jeremy Goodwin and Isaac Jaffee, “The Hungry and the Hunted”


End file.
